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Inglesmond was surveyed by the Terran Alliance during the first waves of interstellar exploration, but was largely ignored until the late twenty-third century.[4] Inglesmond was removed from maps during the First Succession War to indicate that the planet had been depopulated.[5][6][1]

Inglesmond II - more commonly referred to simply as Inglesmond - is the second planet in the system and has a single moon named Martim Vaz.[1] During the Star League era an active shipyard was located in orbit above Martim Vaz.[3]

The Terran Alliance began terraforming Inglesmond in the late twenty-third century, after the major terraforming projects known as Project Aphrodite and Project Lowell had wound down. Inglesmond hadn't been actively targeted for colonization at this point; the terraforming efforts were the result of lobbying on the part of the corporations invested in planetary engineering, which meant that there were no planned colonies lined up for some decades after the terraforming had begun. A group from Britain, a nation on Terra, expressed interest some time later in colonising the planet, with colonization efforts due to begin in or around 2350, the date around which the terraforming staff believed the planet would be sufficiently habitable.[4]

Inglesmond was easier to terraform than Mars or Venus because the illumination provided by the system primary was close to that received by Terra, and thre was little or no native life to deal with beyond microbes. There was abundant liquid water present already, and the atmosphere had a good partial pressure of nitrogen, further assisting the terraforming efforts; the engineers responsible for terraforming Inglesmond went to efforts to sequester oxygen sinks such as the iron contained in the ocean, reducing the need for artificial atmospheric processing so that continuous processing was unnecessary after the mid-twenty-fourth century.[4]

The original plans to colonize Inglesmond came to a halt in 2349; although the British group had plans in place to colonize Inglesmond - which they had named New Britain - Director-GeneralMichael Cameron had other plans. Intent on measures designed to defuse nationalistic or regional patriotism on Terra, Cameron selected Inglesmond as a trial world to be part of a propoganda effort, gifting the world - which he described as a "custom-made paradise" - to the nation known as Brazil. Cameron was intent on weaning the population of states such as Brazil away from supporting nationalistic causes, and instead tie them directly to the Hegemony, by distributing elements of the population to colony worlds across Terran space. The measure was reasonably popular in Brazil, with a Lusophone Brazilian group colonising the planet, which they had given the slang name "English World", a name that Hegemony bureaucrats - predominantly English-speaking, in this case - immortalized incorrectly as "Inglesmond". Cameron believed the project to be successful enough that he used other colony worlds such as Brownsville, Lone Star and New Dallas in similar schemes to earn the loyalty of other groups on Terra.[4]

The colonists on Inglesmond prospered, despite the unusual planetary climate, and in part because not only was Brazil a wealthy nation, but also because there was a wealth of experience available on managing colonial development available by the time the planet was colonised, and Inglesmond was surrounded by the wealthiest, most heavily-developed and instrially-active worlds in the Inner Sphere at the time. For the next four centuries, Inglesmond would be an unremarkable but loyal and industrious member of the Terran Hegemony.

In as much as Inglesmond had a particular economic niche within the Hegemony, it was civilian production; domestic planetary activities drove the planetary economy, but Inglesmond also maintained a healthy trade balance by exporting products such as electronics, jewelry, medicines and unusual materials such as alloys rich in boron, all products intended to make the best use of the limited cargo capacity of DropShips. Inglesmond also developed large shipyards that produced large numbers of common merchant DropShips and JumpShips, and by the height of the Star League Inglesmond was a wealthy and advanced planet with bountiful farmland and rich mineral resources.[4]

Home to more than four billion people by the twenty-eighth century, the bulk of the population of Inglesmond lived on the three middle-latitude continents, which were densely populated with a mix of grasslands and forests. Whilst the bulk of the population lived in nondescript cities located across these three continents, a substantial minority preferred to live in floating arcologies and cities, including at least one Atlantis-class floating city, possibly the largest oceanic habitat structure ever to be built in the Hegemony; these floating settlemeents allowed the inhabitants to migrate back and forth between hemispheres via the two permanently-open ocean channels through the equatorial belt, thereby avoiding the worst of the seasonal extremes. Inglesmond had also developed a combination of transit methods typical to Hegemony worlds of the era, with long-ranged travel being performed by fusion-powered aircraft, while urban areas had access to high-speed trains, light rail and automated railways, and large quantities of bulk freight was shipped around the planet via the oceans.[4]

The local government also followed the normal pattern for a Hegemony world, although local nobles came to increasingly dominate the upper house of the planetary legislature, creating local political themes that were conservative, elitist and somewhat unusual for a Hegemony planet. Although the original settlers had come from Brazil, subsequent waves of immigrants had arrived, reducing the descendants of the original settlers to a small but distinctive part of a much larger whole. The Portuguese dialect spoken by the original settlers remained a secondary language on Inglesmond, with Star League Standard English becoming the primary language, and Inglesmond was a significant source of Portuguese media and literature throughout the Star League era. The Brazilian love of soccer ensured that the sport remained an active pursuit on Inglesmond, with local teams continuing to maintain a dominant presence within the Hegemony leagues, with Inglesmond winning Hegemony and Star League soccer championships roughly once a decade.[4]

Whilst the land-based cities remained generic in appearance, the government buildings and the homes of the wealthier elements of Inglesmond socity developed a "neo-baroque" style of interior decoration that became increasingly famous within the Hegemony, spawning subsequent styles such as Cameron Baroque and Star League Baroque that went on to become popular elsewhere, although the original neo-baroque pattern was consistently followed by those who wanted to imply reserve and refinement along with their wealth.[4]

Initially, the population of Inglesmond supported Stefan Amaris in his staged elections to become Director-General of the Hegemony, a reaction to their disgust at the incompetence of Richard Cameron and the detrimental effect his policies had caused to the Hegemony. Inglesmond's attitude to Amaris was distinctly mercenary, however; when the Great Houses and Commanding GeneralAleksandr Kerensky refused to recognise Amaris as Emperor, support for Amaris on Inglesmond declined, but the local population adopted a policy best described as "keeping its collective head down" after hearing reports of Amaris' brutal actions towards those worlds that were less than cooperative. Inglesmond continued to cooperate with Amaris' government on Terra until 2773, when the Star League Defense Force arrived; the SLDF found that the garrison on Inglesmond was a mix of mercenary forces and soldiers from the Draconis Combine, both of which were removed swiftly. The local government was pro-Amaris, but the bulk of the senior politicians resigned en masse before they could be removed, vanshing into well-paid retirement, a plan that had been developed as a contingency should the SLDF defeat Amaris, with those same politicians ready to return to office if Amaris proved victorious.[4]

Inglesmond's attitude towards Amaris proved unpopular with many other Hegemony worlds, but to the population of Inglesmond it was a reflection of their loyalty to the Hegemony itself, rather than to any particular leader, and that loyalty was demonstrated in 2776 when the local economy was heavily stressed to generate both a local militia - needed to deter adventurism on the part of the Draconis Combine - and to feed the SLDF, whilst contracts to Kerensky's "Hegemony-in-Exile" government were duly taken up and taxes paid quickly after Inglesmond's liberation. The active support for the new regime led to Inglesmond rapidly militarizing, even as the Combine moved to occupy local systems such as Imbros III, Styx and Telos IV as soon as their pro-Amaris or SLDF garrisons departed.[4]

After Amaris was defeated, Inglesmond concentrated the bulk of its efforts on itself, whilst waiting for a reorganization effort to centralise and restore the Hegemony; by 2782, the government of Inglesmond recognised that the Hegemony was effectively moribund and that no Terra-led reorgnization was going to happen. The government on Inglesmond attempted to lead a regional restoration, attempting to rebuild the Hegemony back up through local efforts as a number of other worlds were also doing, but these efforts were generally poorly received by other worlds, set against a backdrop of empire-building efforts attempted by numerous novice administrators, governments and nobles across the Hegemony. When Kerenksy led the bulk of the SLDF on the Exodus, the government on Inglesmond knew that a graceful restoration of the Hegemony was going to be impossible, and shifted their economy towards wartime mobilization efforts.[4]

As with a number of other planetary governments within the Lone Star District, the government of Inglesmond knew that it would have to defend Inglesmond and the other local worlds against the Great Houses, until Terra could somehow restore itself.[4]

Despite the general military buildup on Inglesmond and the expectation that the Great Houses would attempt to seize worlds close to them, the sheer scale of the First Succession War shocked the population of Inglesmond, who hadn't anticipated how blatant or swift the efforts to devour the worlds of the Hegemony would be. Despite this shock, militia forces from Inglesmond - which included veteran SLDF personnel and cutting-edge war machines - worked with local forces to bleed the DCMS on Deneb Algedi, Kervil and Styx; meanwhile, LTV Aerospace worked on constructing WarShips in their Inglesmond shipyards.[4]

In 2787 the DCMS launched a devastating raid against the LTV Aerospace shipyards, destroying both the two WarShips borrowed from Dieron that were in the system and millions of tons of partially-constructed WarShips within the yards themselves. This was a body blow to the defenders, one contributed to the tide turning against Inglesmond and its efforts to defend the local region. The defenders were also unprepared for the willingness of DCMS forces to deploy weapons of mass destruction, a willingness that far exceeded even that of Amaris' forces during the Civil War, and these two factors led to the Inglesmond forces being driven back to Inglesmond itself.[4] The Combine had focussed on Inglesmond because of defeats suffered in the region in 2786 and 2787, some of which forces from Inglesmond had been involved in, and because of a revised strategic assessment of the capabilities Inglesmond possessed that had previously been overlooked. The government of Inglesmond was continuing to upgrade the LTV Aerospace yards, and work was continuing apace on the first production run of WarShips, despite the fall of Dieron in December 2786, which had slowed progress. Inglesmond still hadn't fully mobilised by late 2787, but the DCMS had calculated that the combination of heavy industry, political stability and wealth available to Inglesmond meant that in addition to the threat of active WarShip production, Inglesmond would also be capable of raising several brigades of militia in just a few years, militia that had already proven formidable in battle. With both the Federated Suns and Lyran Commonwealth representing real and active threats to the Combine, the risk of even a part of the Terran Hegemony forming a resurgent nation represented a threat that couldn't be ignored.[3]

The raid that destroyed the WarShips in the Inglesmond system and the LTV Aerospace yards was conducted without the use of Combine WarShips, as the bulk of the Combine navy was already in action against the Federated Suns and Lyran Commonwealth. While Combine forces launched a diversionary attack on Lone Star, a small group of converted DropShips armed with nuclear tipped Barracuda missiles were transported to the L1 Inglesmond-Martim Vaz pirate point and attacked the battle station located there; at the same time, a smaller contingent of converted DropShips equipped with Alamos raced to destroy the shipyards in orbit above Martim Vaz. The heavy use of nuclear weapons against the battle station distracted Inglesmond's defenders, who decided by a narrow margin to concentrate their aerospace forces against the DropShips attacking the station, ignoring the group that headed for Martim Vaz. That close decision allowed the Combine to destroy the shipyards and its defenders.[3]

Faced with the rapacious Combine forces, the government of Inglesmond actively attempted to solicit assistance from the Federated Suns and Lyran Commonwealth, pledging loyalty in exchange for relief from the inevitably Combine assault, but neither nation managed to send more than a single regiment of mixed forces to Inglesmond, and those forces simply turned the defense of Inglesmond into a four-way debacle. The Lyran, Federated Suns and Combine forces all resorted to using scorched earth tactics, deploying nuclear weapons in a determined frenzy to claim a planet that was still wealthy and well-industrialised. After more than eleven gigatons of nuclear weapons had been used, and having finally seized control of Inglesmond in 2789, the Combine abandoned the planet just ten years later when no useful salvage was left amongst the various radioactive craters that had once been industrial complexes, and Inglesmond was left a wasteland shrouded in the depths of a nuclear winter.[4]

Inglesmond was removed from maps in 2801 after a perfunctory effort by ComStar to locate survivors.[4]

Whereas many worlds devastated to a similar degree to Inglesmond were rendered uninhabitable, the terraforming efforts conducted on Inglesmond had been thorough, and this led to a surprising degree of resilience. Left effectively free of human influence for centuries, the ecosystem, climate and ozone layer of Inglesmond all recovered, reaching a point by the mid-thirty-second century that could effectively last indefinitely. Small populations of humans had survived on Inglesmond, but these were preyed on repeatedly by those scavenging for lostech during the Succession Wars, as the presence of surviving members of the rightful population endangered the legality of salvage campaigns. The survivors had at one point even managed to sustain four large communities until 2803, when the DCMS noticed their presence during a salvage operation and nuked all four settlements, something Lyran Commonwealth intelligence services uncovered later.[4]

The survivors, located on Amazonas, had numbered perhaps a million people and had avoided detection when ComStar surveyed the world by maintaining strict radio silence - and because they had chosen Amazonas as the place to congregate. During the Star League era, the bulk of the continent had been a nature preserve, and as a result there were very few targets such as factories or cities - or, in the later stages of the 2788-2780 nuclear scouring, radio emitters and campfires - for the various House forces to drop nukes on. The ecosystem had already begun to rebound on Amazonas by 2803, and the refugees had maintained strict quarantines to prevent lingering bioweapons from gaining a foothold on the continent. One of the reasons the survivors had chosen Amazonas was the presence of a militia base that had escaped destruction, and still had functioning facilities such as machine shops, power plants and a clinic, as well as food stores and an intact BattleMech battalion of late-SLDF 'Mechs. The survivors had spent eleven years re-establishing agriculture, creating a fibreoptic-based telecommunications network and building towns using decent materials and infrastructure. The Combine survey teams presumed that the survivor communites were in fact undamaged towns from the Star League years, and were intent on looting these presumably-untouched enclaves whilst also gaining the honor of informing the Combine government that the planet was still inhabited and useful. The survey teams also presumed that the surviving population would welcome any aid from external sources - only to have their small BattleMech guard detail and the accompanying WorkMechs destroyed by the survivors militia forces, which had managed to maintain a number of the recovered 'Mechs. The salvage team responded by withdrawing to orbit and converting civilian small craft into improvised bombers equipped with fusion demolition charges nromally used to breach Castles Brian; modified with improvised aerial freefall casings and altimeter fuses, these weapons were enough to destroy the survivors, although the obvious routes taken by the aircraft as they approached the settlements might have been detected, if the survivor militia had been more alert than they were.[7]

ComStar made a public visit to Inglesmond in 2822 and again recertified the planet as uninhabited, but the mixed results of the survey led to Inglesmond still appearing as an inhabited world on some maps at the time. Another secret ComStar expdition to Inglesmond in 2912 again left the planet certified as uninhabited, but human survivors continued to cling to a precarious existence in some places.[4]

Forces from the Coalition assembled by Devlin Stone were investigating the possibility of using Inglesmond as a secret staging area for the assault on Terra during the Jihad when they discovered the surviving human population. Reduced to a hunter-gatherer existence, the survivors had formed several dozen tribes armed with metal implements salvaged from the Star League-era ruins as they feuded with each other. The most powerful tribe consisted of a inbred group of several clans, and occupied the remains of a Castle Brian that was still producing some distilled water and geothermal electricity. The Castle Brian was located deep inside a massive granite mountain the locals had named "Doosamontana", a name considered to most probably be a corruption of the Star League-era Portuguese term "God Mountain". In addition to discovering the surviving population, the Coalition scouts also determined that bioweapons from the First Succession War were still active in the environment in various mutated forms, and abandoned plans to use Inglesmond because of the lack of time to develop countermeasures.[4]

During the Dark Age the Republic of the Sphere effectively treated Inglesmond as a planetary nature preserve, allowing the native population to be studied remotely by a multinational team of researchers.[4]

Inglesmond is located 0.83 Astronomical Units from the system primary, with a circular orbit that lasts just 290 Terran days. With an axial tilt of almost seventy degrees - a very unusual degree of tilt, almost certainly due to Martim Vaz, Inglesmond's large moon and a relic of a massive impact on Inglesmond early in the history of the world - and the relatively short local year, seasons on Inglesmond are short and sharp. Martim Vaz follows an equatorial orbit around Inglesmond, and while the large moon keeps the planetary axial tilt at it's extreme level, it also provides the planet with a great deal of stability against the interference of the other gravitational sources within the system.[4]

While the climate on Inglesmond is stable, it is also considered to be rather bizarre in many ways; each pole spends a quarter of the year pointed almost directly at the system primary, creating summers that are hot, with an average temperature of 40°C and temperatures in local regions within the polar island interiors exceeding 80°C. Conversely, during the winter months, each pole falls almost entirely into darkness, experiencing freezing temperatures; if not for the enormous thermal mass of the planetary oceans, the poles would likely experience considerable sea ice development. The planetary equator spends half the year barely illuminated, with the sun located in a highly oblique position, while for the other half of the year, the equator is located directly under the sun and experiences a regular twenty-one-hour day. This contrast means that the permanent ice "cap" on the planet isn't actually a cap, but rather a belt around the equator, sustained by the continually cold temperatures found there.[4]

Inglesmond has six continents named Amazonas, Catarina, Ceara, Ionus, Para and Sergipe. Two of these continents - Para and Sergipe - are the largest and smallest continents on the planet, respectively, and form a belt around the equator of Inglesmond that anchors the planetary ice belt. The continents of Amazonas, Catarina and Ceara are located in the middle latitudes of the northern and southern hemispheres, with Ceara being the largest of the three and Catarina the smallest. These three continents have well-developed ecosystems derived from Terran flora and fauna, much of which was tweaked to better handle the long Inglesmond days, particularly the flora. A range of terrestrial biomes can be found on these continents, included deserts, swamps and rainforests, while the deep ocean ecosystems have equally well-developed fauna including a greater number of cetacean species than Terra itself, although the coastal ecosystems and coral reefs on the planet were still developing by the thirty-second century. The northern and southern edges of Para and Sergipe remain ice-free all year, but are prone to severe flooding during the spring and autumn seasons.[4]

Notable islands on Inglesmond include Ilha dos Baleias, Ilha das Abelhas and Ilhabela. The seas and oceans of Inglesmond include Vasta Oceano, located in the southern hemisphere, O Corredor, located between Ionas and Para, Oceano Sereno, located between Amazonas, Catarina and Para, Mar do Norte, located between Para, Ceara and Catarina, Mar Murada, located between Amazonas, Ceara and the island of Ilha dos Baleas, and Mar de Dois Santos, located between Ceara, Ionas, and the islands of Ihla dos Baleas and Ilhabela. Located to the east of Ceara is Baidansia, the bay or sea formerly known as Baía de Ânsia during the Star League era. A chain of substantial inland seas located on Para are known as Lagos Brilhantes. There are substantial mountain ranges on some continents, including the Montanhas Rijo, Montanhas Baixo and Montanhas Acima ranges on Para and the Montanhas Avermelhadas range on Catarina.[41]